Why Get An Annual Eye Exam After LASIK Surgery?

In a word: yes.

Sometimes the answer surprises LASIK patients. After all, the goal of LASIK is to live life as glasses-free as possible. So why go to an eye doctor if you don’t need glasses or contact lenses to see clearly?

When you have your peepers examined, the comprehensive exam is more than checking your vision. The eye doctors are determining whether your eyes are healthy.

Good vision is the result of a healthy visual system and the correct shape of the eye and lens. If a person has healthy eyes but can’t see clearly, the cause could be a refractive error.

Refractive errors are not generally considered eye diseases but a disorder resulting from a mismatch between the eye’s length and the shape of the lenses.

Imagine your eye is like a camera. With a refractive error you have a camera that’s in good shape, but isn’t focusing because the lenses aren’t right.

Glasses and contact lenses correct refractive errors – nearsightedness, farsightedness, and astigmatism – by compensating for the out-of-focus lenses by placing additional lenses in front of the eye. It is like adding lenses on top of the existing lenses on your camera.

LASIK corrects refractive errors by adjusting the shape and curvature of the outermost lens of the eye, called the cornea.

Back to the camera analogy, LASIK is like adjusting the curvature and shape of the front lens of the camera so that no add-on lenses are needed to get a good, clear picture.

But a camera has more parts than just the lenses. The outer casing, moving parts, and the inside technology are all essential parts to a good, working camera. So the entire camera is important to care for. A comprehensive eye exam is like a routine checkup for a camera to make sure that all parts are working properly, not just the lenses.

Your visual system has even more parts than a camera does, and can also be affected by systemic problems that affect the rest of your body. Here are just a couple “parts of your camera” that are important to monitor with regular eye exams in order to try and keep them healthy.

Continuing with to the camera analogy, the retina is like the inside technology of a camera that captures the focused light. The retina is one of the parts of the eye that is examined in a comprehensive eye exam. The retina is affected by diseases like macular degeneration, glaucoma, and diabetes.

Sometimes patients do not know they have diabetes and their eye doctor is the first to notice changes to the retina and help their patients identify and diagnose diabetes early, allowing the patient to begin treatment sooner.

Similarly, early diagnosis of macular degeneration and glaucoma are critical to help slow and hopefully prevent vision loss.

Dry eye issues are also very commonplace, especially in dry climates like Colorado.

Back to our camera analogy, dry eye problems can disrupt the smoothness and clarity of the lens, like taking pictures with a lens that has smudges, scratches, or even little pits on the surface. The whole camera actually works well, but the image coming in is distorted by the imperfections on the surface of the lens.

A qualified eye doctor can identify and treat dry eye problems to clear up the picture.

Whether you use glasses or contacts, have good vision naturally, or have good vision via LASIK, it is important to keep your eyes healthy and visit your eye doctor on a regularly.